Photograph by J.Scott Applewhite/ Associated Press
Palin’s influence will likely increase this year during the approach to the November mid-term elections. Mid-terms typically have a lower voter turnout than presidential elections, which means that energizing a party’s base—a task at which Palin excels—is crucial. She also has the ability to shape Republican nomination battles. She already endorsed Rick Perry as the Republican nominee for Texas governor. He won on the first ballot. “There will be plenty who will try to take advantage of her,” says Hess.
The big question is whether Palin will run for president in 2012. She’s acting like she will. As well as linking herself to the growing Tea Party movement, she recently appeared on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and even delivered a public speech in the sumptuous Palomino Room at Calgary’s BMO Centre last weekend. (Her denunciation of “snake oil” climate science was greeted joyfully by an elite, wealthy audience that included federal Treasury Board President Stockwell Day and former Calgary mayor Ralph Klein.)
More than 70 per cent of respondents to a recent Washington Post/ABC poll said she’s unqualified to be president—an even higher percentage than during her campaign for vice-president in 2008. But to secure the Republican party’s nomination, Palin needs to win over a comparatively small number of voters during the primaries. In theory, these Republicans will make their choice at least in part based on who they think has the best chance of winning when it matters: against the Democratic nominee on election night. But it rarely works that way in practice.
“The primary process in the United States pulls both parties to the extreme,” says Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank. “That’s always been the case. And that may be the case in 2012 for the Republicans. When primary voters go out in the cold in Iowa, they’re really true believers. They want someone they think agrees with them. I think Palin has the advantage because she is so popular with the base.”
At the Tea Party’s national convention last month, audience members chanted: “Run, Sarah, run.”
Henry Olsen of the American Enterprise Institute thinks Palin wants to run, and will if she thinks she has a chance of winning. For now, he says, big-money Republican donors are keeping their distance. But Barack Obama proved that a campaign can be built on many small contributions rather than a few big ones. “The political process in America is entrepreneurial,” he says. Palin may learn something from her favourite punching bag.
Haynes Johnson, the author and journalist, is also convinced Palin intends to run. He doesn’t think she’ll win the Republican nomination, much less the presidency. She will shape the party’s politics, however, and, he believes, hurt it. “In the long run, she’s very much a negative. She’s so divisive and she has nothing to offer. She is, really, truly ignorant about issues. It’s breathtaking in many ways,” he says.
And yet even Johnson agrees she can’t be sidelined. She’s too popular. She brings energy and excitement to a party that doesn’t have much of either. The most the Republican party’s establishment can hope to do is control her. It won’t be easy.
